It’s quite clever design, really. They drank out of the broad side once they grew up, so why not out of the small end as babies?

It’s like a natural funnel (that just happens to resemble those ear trumpets old Victorian gentlemen used).

Here the archeologists found wooden feeding devices made of cow horns. The Slavs used to attach leather sacks with milk to the broad ends of hollow horns and their babies would suck the milk through holes in the narrow part of horns.

How can a wooden feeding device be made of cow horns, you ask? Best not delve. Sometimes the press release translations can get a little wacky.

No preliminary dating of the find yet, but I’m going to front like I know what I’m saying and guess that it’s medieval. Veliky Novgorod was big in the middle ages.

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Very interesting! Russians love it when they dig up really old stuff. Especially certain nationalist groups, because they feel it gives Russia a stronger historical claim to being the real Slavic homeland. Velikii Novgorod (oddly, the Great New City) was one of the major centers of power in Kievan Rus and some historians assert that it was capital to Rurik, the legendary founder of the Rurikid dynasty before his son capture Kiev.

You are correct about the “wooden” thing being a mistranslation. Referring to the Russian article, the proper translation would be “bony.”

I was getting that nationalist vibe from the “article”, but it wasn’t as overt as it sometimes is. (The Iranian press is without peer when it comes to archaeological PR running political interference.)

Wooden = bony, eh? You’d think with all the spam I get from .ru addresses they’d have that sort of fine distinction all figured out by now.

I like to think they were only used when the mom had died and there was no wetnurse, but I like to think lots of happy thoughts. There was a photo in that book of a crib with a mount to hold such a horn.

The same book had photos of “feeding cans” which were kind of baby bottles for older kids who sucked on a spout. They were metal and they were refilled without being cleaned out, said the author.

I had babies at the time and was reading on the history of breastfeeding and such. Although I never went to see, the book said there was a collection of such things at the medical school library at the University of New Mexico.